


if this is home

by Siria



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: F/M, secondary character death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-23
Updated: 2013-01-23
Packaged: 2017-11-26 15:19:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 17,145
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/651734
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Siria/pseuds/Siria
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steve keeps waking up in the wrong place.</p>
            </blockquote>





	if this is home

**Author's Note:**

> With thanks to my intrepid team of betas, sheafrotherdon, musesfool and trinityofone, for all their hard work on this!

Steve had always found it soothing: the weekly task of spreading yesterday's paper out on the floor and lining his shoes up on it; sitting with his elbows braced on his knees while he worked polish into dark leather and buffed until he could just about see his face reflected back at him. His mom had only ever been able to afford thin-soled shoes from the cheapest department stores, and Bucky's growth spurts had left Steve looking up to him in more ways than one. Still, a little time spent sitting at the kitchen table on Saturday nights, and Steve always felt like he could step out into the world looking like he took some pride in himself. 

There hadn't been much time for shoe polishing during the war, of course—not once Steve had left the USO behind and his whole world had narrowed down to his team, and a map of Europe, and the fight, and the rich red of Peggy's smile—but he'd picked the habit back up again after he woke. Maybe it wasn't something people seemed to do much anymore, not when most of them favoured soft canvas and plastic shoes, but it helped him on the nights when sleep was hardest to come by. 

Steve sat by the window and looked out at Manhattan's bright lights and concentrated on the brush's soft shushing sounds: ritual now as much as habit. It calmed him, took away the worst of the noises in his head, distracted him from the loneliness that still caught him unawares sometimes, left him breathless for all that he was starting to find a new team here. Once done, he lined the shoes up neatly—two pair black dress, one pair tan Oxfords, one pair brown motorcycle boots—against his dresser. When, a little after two in the morning, he finally lay down on his bed, they were still in his line of sight, like talismans that Steve could focus on as his eyelids grew heavy and his breathing steadied and—

 

—and he opened his eyes to pale blue floral wallpaper and a window that looked out on the branches of a maple tree that had shed almost all of its browning leaves. He blinked once, twice, but when the room didn't resolve itself into the clean mahogany lines that Pepper and her decorator favoured, he sat bolt upright. The room Steve was in definitely wasn't in Tony's skyscraper, nor was it anywhere else that he recognised. He was sitting on one side of a double bed that was covered with several layers of blankets and a comforter—also floral, though this pattern was of deep pink, blowsy roses. There was a dresser, a freestanding closet, a chest of drawers, an easy chair, all of them of a style that Steve didn't particularly associate with 2013. When he looked down at himself, he saw that he was wearing pyjamas—proper pyjamas, in a deep burgundy pattern that he was sure in his bones that Tony would have mocked, the kind he'd been told no one his age wore any more. 

It was all so unexpected that it took him a long moment to take everything in, and then the adrenaline kicked in and with it, the panic. Was he back in S.H.I.E.L.D. all over again, or somewhere worse, waking up twice over to a sham of the world he'd lost? Steve stood up, abruptly enough that his legs got tangled in the bed sheets and he stubbed his toe against the nightstand. The sharp pain made him curse with a creativity that would've made Dum-Dum proud. He was just gingerly putting his weight back on the floorboards when he heard a muffled voice calling out, lilting upwards as if asking a question. Carefully, he opened the bedroom door, wishing for the comforting weight of his shield in his hand, and then there was the voice again. "Steve? Are you up? Breakfast's ready."

Steve felt more frozen than he ever had under layers of Arctic ice, breath halting, heart stopping, because—no. No. He'd lost this. He'd never gotten to really have this, and there was a noise in his head, a dreadful roaring sound like the wind rushing in through a plane's shattered windows as the ground rushed up to meet him. But then he breathed in again and walked slowly, deliberately down the stairs, clinging to the bannister the whole way with one trembling hand; then he turned left and into the yellow-painted kitchen, where Peggy was standing and poking at a pot of what smelled like over-cooked oatmeal with a dubious expression on her face. 

He stopped, stunned, because it was _Peggy_. Peggy, young and vital and smiling at him with an everyday kind of happiness on her face—not at all like the last time he'd seen her, when the smile she'd worn had been made bittersweet by a lifetime's separation, by illness and age and the knowledge that the years between them couldn't be overcome, not now. 

"I was starting to think you were playing at Sleeping Beauty," she said, spooning the oatmeal out into a bowl. "A whole twelve hours! That's not like you at all."

"I," Steve said eloquently. He had the dizzying thought that if he just reached out, he would be able to touch her, and the idea made his hands shake. He stuck them hurriedly into the pockets of his pyjama pants. Oh God, he was standing in front of Peggy wearing just his pyjamas. "Uh."

"But transatlantic flights are always horridly tiring, even with the benefit of the serum, I suppose." She put the bowl on the kitchen table next to a steaming mug of coffee. "I'm sorry I have to dash out like this on a Sunday, but there's been some sort of minor crisis at the Consulate and they want me to come in. The idiot son of the earl of somewhere came over all Bertie Wooster with a senator's daughter and there's hell to pay." Peggy picked up the hat that had been sitting on a countertop and pinned it on at the appropriate angle, slicked on some pale pink lipstick that didn't seem like her at all. She checked her appearance in the small mirror she produced from her handbag, nodded in evident approval, then hurried over and went up on tiptoes to kiss Steve—a brief, shocking warmth that made his toes curl and his eyes close of their own accord. "Um. Sorry about the burnt bits, but you can just pick them out. I shan't be too late, I hope."

And then she was gone, the front door closing behind her with a resounding thump—but not before Steve had caught sight of the gold band on her left ring finger. He looked down at his own hand to see a matching ring there, looked up at the calendar on the wall which said _November 1948_ , and sat down very heavily on the nearest chair. 

This was all a dream. It had to be a dream, though the linoleum felt cool and smooth beneath his bare feet, the sun flooding in through the kitchen window was hot against the back of his neck, and his toe still throbbed dully from where he'd hit it against the bed. Steve sat there, thinking that any moment, something would happen—his second grade teacher would show up, telling him off for mistakes in his math homework, or the characters from _Dumbo_ would parade through the living room—that would prove this was all a quirk of his dreaming brain, or that he'd just wake up, but nothing happened. The house around him was quiet save for the ticking of the clock on the wall, the occasional rumble of a passing car. 

He lost track of time, at least until his stomach rumbled, and Steve found himself picking up his spoon and eating a few mouthfuls of lukewarm oatmeal. This had to be just an unusually vivid dream: the spoon in his hand, the half-empty sugar bowl on the table, the dishes stacked up on the draining board, all of it had to be something his tired mind had called up. Yet when he tried to concentrate on 2013 in an effort to wake himself, that was what felt like some half-remembered fantasy from a pulp magazine: space aliens and Manhattan skyscrapers and Howard's son palling around with Soviet assassins and nuclear monsters. Trying to tease out the difference between memory and imagination made him feel queasy and eventually Steve pushed away the bowl of oatmeal, stood, and went for an exploratory wander around the house. 

There was a part of him that seemed to know its layout, to recognise that the table and chairs in the small dining room had been a joint wedding gift from the Commandos, to know that the third step on the stairs always creaked a little, and that their neighbours were called the Halls and the Bassos, but none of it seemed truly familiar and there were some things that he couldn't place at all. Whose library book was it that sat on the coffee table, the stub of an old train ticket marking the place? Who'd tuned the radio in to WNBC, or left that comb sitting on the mantelpiece? Even the framed photographs seemed more like something that JARVIS could have concocted out of scraps and misdirection than authentic records of Steve's past. Steve knew his dress uniform, he knew Peggy's smile, but he had no brightly coloured memories to match the black-and-white wedding photos that hung on the wall. 

He'd always tried to avoid the comic books that had circulated about the adventures of Captain America and the Howling Commandos—someone with Steve's face, his name, had strode across those pages in four-colour splendour, performing impossible heroics with unwavering self-confidence, but it hadn't been him. The level of discomfort he'd felt watching the guys pass the comics around, joking about their simplistic exploits and silly catchphrases, was nothing compared to what he felt now, when he couldn't quite tell if he was the one who was the imposter. It didn't help that the more he tried to line up his two sets of memories, the more his head hurt. Yesterday he'd attended a meeting with Fury and the Joint Chiefs, but yesterday he'd gone shopping with Peggy, and… It was like trying to look directly at the sun. Every instinct he had shied away from it. 

Instead Steve went upstairs and swapped the pyjamas he was wearing for a pair of khaki pants and a soft grey pullover sweater. His clothes hung neatly in the closet next to Peggy's—there were tailored suits that weren't so different from the uniforms she'd almost always worn around him, but also shirt dresses in deep jewel tones and day dresses in bright prints. Everything smelled faintly of laundry soap and Peggy's favourite perfume. Steve reached out hesitantly and ran a hand along the row of full, rustling skirts, feeling a sudden hot, rush of embarrassment at how bizarrely intimate a gesture it was. He closed the closet with enough force that the bang of it echoed around the quiet house.

Peggy got back late in the afternoon, looking tired and pinched around the mouth. Steve didn't know if he should hug her, or kiss her good evening, or even go near her at all, so settled for standing around awkwardly while she tossed her hat onto the sofa and said several rather rude things about snot-nosed members of the British aristocracy and young women who thought that swooning was an effective debate technique. "For a secondment that's supposedly a promotion," she said, ramming back in some of her hairpins that had come loose, "it feels awfully like one of Dante's Hells. I wish they'd give me something _proper_ to do." With one final, thwarted sound, she declared all discussion of work off-limits for the rest of the evening.

They had bread rolls and re-heated soup for dinner, sitting at the kitchen table while Peggy talked about the box she was packing up to send to her sisters to take the edge off the worst of the rationing, and tried to decide what would make the best wedding present for Gabe and his fiancée. While they ate, Peggy's left hand brushed against his, and her smiles were ready and frequent. Once, Steve gave in to the temptation and reached out with uncertain fingers to brush a stray curl back from her face, because he'd never got to have this with Peggy—never had this easy, permitted touch between them—and when her only reaction was to grin at him and call him a not-so-secret romantic, it felt a little like his pre-serum asthma had come flooding back. He felt his face heat, and he bowed his head over his soup bowl in an attempt to hide his reaction.

In the evening, they sat curled together on the couch, listening to the radio and reading while the fire in the grate took the chill out of the fall evening. The library book was Peggy's, it turned out: a murder mystery set on an English country estate, which she seemed to be enjoying mostly on account of how terrible it was. Some of Steve's unease was starting to fade, because nothing in the way Peggy looked at him felt wrong, and it was getting easier to believe that he was feeling shaken from a lingering dream, than it was to think that he'd spent seventy years locked away under the ice. 

Later, they went upstairs, and Steve had rarely felt as nervous as he did when he slipped into bed beside Peggy. She slid close to him, fitting herself against him with a practiced ease which said that she knew his body as well as she did her own. Yet as much as Steve had dreamed about nights like this—as much as he'd pulled himself off roughly, biting his lip and thinking of Peggy's warm voice and red, red mouth—the reality of it filled him with a strange sense of panic. Even with the weight of the ring on his finger, it didn't quite feel like he had permission to touch her, not to mention the fact that he wouldn't know what to do if he did. Not that he didn't know in the abstract, of course—he'd grown up in a thin-walled tenement building with Bucky Barnes for a best friend, and any last lingering gaps in his knowledge had been put paid to by Tony Stark and cable TV—but there was a difference between that and the particular, between that and knowing how to give Peggy everything that she deserved. 

Peggy's fingertips dipped beneath the waistband of his pyjamas, her legs tangling with his, and even that simple touch made the muscles of his abdomen jump, made him swallow noisily. Steve felt terrifyingly aware of his own body: of his own arousal, of the way he felt flushed and restless, Peggy's grin making his skin prickle all over with fresh heat. It would have been so easy to give in, but he summoned up self-control from somewhere, and made himself settle for a close-mouthed kiss and a murmured excuse about lingering tiredness. 

"Oh," Peggy said, moving away a little and settling back against the pillows, "of course, it is quite late." 

She sounded quite calm, but there was a faint hint of disappointment to her words, a trace of hurt, that Steve kept turning over in his mind until, in the dim light of the room, his eyes drifted closed and—

 

—"Good morning, sir. It's 7:00 am. The weather is currently overcast and 50 degrees Fahrenheit, with a chance of light rain this afternoon. There are five new email messages awaiting your attention, and Director Fury has left you a voicemail. Miss Potts wished me to inform you that breakfast is laid out in the smaller lounge, should you wish to join the others this morning."

Steve opened his eyes to see the high, polished concrete ceiling of his Manhattan bedroom. It had just been a nightmare after all: the worst kind, because it had been something he'd wanted and couldn't ever have. He swallowed past the sudden lump in his throat. He'd had his grieving, had promised himself that it was time to put it all behind him now. The life he'd had was gone, most of his friends were gone, and Peggy'd passed four months ago, 93 years old and straight-backed to the end. There was no point in his body straining, selfish and greedy, for something it could never have. He took a deep breath. Enough.

"Sir?"

Steve scrubbed at his eyes, feeling suddenly, fiercely furious with himself for clinging to something that went beyond false hope into self hurt, like the weeks just after Bucky died when Steve had tormented himself thinking about all the things he could have done differently, all the ways in which maybe, just maybe, there was a chance... He threw back the covers. "Yeah, JARVIS, thanks. I'll… I'll be down soon."

He took a long shower first, the water turned as hot as he could stand it. Still, he didn't think it was that which made his skin feel raw and prickly as he went about his day: breakfast and emails, the gym and requisition paperwork and returning Fury's call, lap after lap of the deep pool that took up most of one floor in the tower. A little after five, he got hungry and started thinking about raiding the fridge in the communal kitchen for the remains of the weekend's Chinese takeout, but stopped when he realised that he hadn't been outside all day. The tower was a fancier place than Steve had ever dreamed about living in when he was a kid, and sure beat a fifth floor walk-up with temperamental faucets and a heating system that was no match for a New York winter. Sometimes, though, Steve thought that it was as if Tony had engineered the tower to be too comfortable, too easily able to cater to your every whim. He felt suddenly itchy for the pavement underneath his feet and the wind on his face and whichever diner he could find that would serve him a blue-plate special smothered in brown gravy. 

He grabbed his jacket and headed out, Clint tagging along because he said he knew a place nearby that did the world's best meatloaf, hands down. They made it three whole blocks before Steve remembered the difference between the press tours of the Forties and modern paparazzi: it was a whole different level of intrusiveness nowadays. Clint had a scarf he could wrap around the lower half of his face, but Steve just had to grit his teeth and rely on the length of his stride to shake them. 

"Course the hell of it," Clint said as they rounded a corner, "is that they're just as happy to see you walk away."

Steve frowned at him. "What?"

"Your ass, buddy," Clint said, clapping him on the shoulder. "Apparently you can get a lot of money for a good picture of Captain America's butt. Nat says it's got its own website."

Sadly, although the meatloaf was as delicious as Clint had claimed, no comfort food was quite good enough to drive away all of Steve's irritation—not even when Clint looked at him steadily and said, "You look like a man who's in need of pie. Pecan or blueberry? What am I saying, both."

It wasn't long after nine when they got back to the tower, but Steve already felt exhausted, more bone-weary than he'd felt after some pitched battles. He pled off watching whichever game it was that Clint had recorded, said goodnight to him and headed to his quarters, yawning wide enough to make his jaw pop, barely able to toe off his shoes before he collapsed onto his bed and—

 

—woke to the same blue floral wallpaper, the same bare, spreading tree. Steve sat up slowly, feeling his heart hammer in his chest with fear. He was back in the house; he could hear Peggy humming in the bathroom as she got ready for work, smell her perfume hanging in the air and feel the bed sheets soft against his hands. Just like last time, nothing had that hazy, detached quality that Steve tended to associate with his dreams, and if this was his hindbrain trying to tell him something, he still had no idea what.

He got dressed while Peggy was still in the bathroom, tugging on the clothes laid out neatly on a chair, raising an eyebrow at the uniform which told him that he was Major Rogers now. Steve made it through breakfast by rote, though he caught Peggy looking at him once or twice, as if there was something she was trying to puzzle out while she buttered her toast and sipped at her coffee. He smiled at her each time, and that seemed to reassure her. 

Muscle memory got him outside afterwards. He watched Peggy get into her car and turn left out of their neat driveway while somehow knowing that he himself would have to turn right. That same instinctive feeling meant that he returned the salutes of the guards at the entry to the base, who all seemed to know who he was; meant that knew where to park his car and led him right to his office without erring. It was eerie, as if someone had taken knowledge and stuffed it right inside his head without him ever having to actually learn any of it. Steve knew he had to have learned all of it at some point, but every time he tried to think about _when_ , it caused just the same thing as yesterday: a persistent headache, a vague doubling of his vision as if he'd looked at a bright light for too long.

Steve had spent his war out on the battlefield with his men, but it looked like in the war's aftermath, his duty lay behind a desk. The nameplate on his door proclaimed that Major Rogers was an advisor of some kind; useful work, he supposed, though not anything he'd ever felt particularly drawn to before. The paperwork on his desk was layered thick over a map of Czechoslovakia. Steve ran his fingers over the pages, reading through them first with confusion and then once again with growing horror. He'd spent his war working to help these people—fought his way over forested hilltops, slogged through the mud beside cheerful, dogged resistance fighters who'd had scarcely any more English than he'd had words of German or Czech—and now it looked like he spent his days figuring out how to hem them in, hold them back, while also dutifully filling in expense slips with carbon paper duplicates. Steve couldn't quite understand it; why was this part of his dream? 

Lunch was gritty coffee and limp sandwiches, eaten in a canteen that was full of cigarette smoke and conversation. Steve sat quietly and listened to his departmental colleagues talk, but that much at least seemed to be normal for him. No one raised an eyebrow or asked him questions that he wouldn't have been able to answer. 

"Would you look at this," one of the men said. He had receding brown hair and a spatter of freckles across the bridge of his nose, and was peering at the newspaper in his hands in a way that said if he didn't already own a pair of reading glasses, he would pretty soon. "One of 'em's come out and said Hiss isn't just a Commie—he's a spy. Says he's got the papers to prove it."

"Yeah, well," another man said, this one sitting at the end of the table. He seemed to consume cigarettes instead of food; the tips of his fingers were stained saffron yellow. "Figures, right? You think you can trust a Commie to have any loyalty to this country? Course not. They're all in Uncle Joe's pocket. Sooner the HUAC roots them all out the better."

"Be careful what you wish for," a third guy said. "They start digging for one thing, they're going to start digging for other things, next thing you know—"

"Yeah, yeah, yeah," the first guy said, with a long-suffering air. Steve got the distinct impression the group had been over this subject several times. "Can we not give ourselves indigestion, here?"

That evening, Steve went home right on the stroke of five and ended up in the little study at the back of the house, reading through the old copies of the _New York Times_ that he'd found bundled up outside next to the trash cans. S.H.I.E.L.D. had debriefed him thoroughly when he'd woken up, of course, but he'd still been disoriented, and with no frame of reference the Fifties and Sixties had blended rapidly into the Seventies and Eighties. He'd known there had been some bad stuff, had heard about the House Un-American Activities Committee and the Cold War, assassinations and witch hunts, but now he realised he hadn't fully understood any of it. 

"They told me we won the war," he remembered telling Fury, "they didn't say what we lost." Now, as he turned the pages, his fingers blackened with newsprint, he wondered if there had always been more at stake than he'd thought.

He stayed holed up in there reading, even once Peggy got home, pleading off dinner with the excuse that he'd eaten a little too much for lunch and he had work he urgently needed to do.

"Okay," Peggy said a little doubtfully, pressing the back of her hand briefly to his forehead as if to check for a temperature. She brought him tea and toast and then left him to it. Steve leafed through page after page of news until the cheap paper left sharp cuts scattered across his fingertips and he probably could have recited by heart the names of everyone who'd testified in front of a congressional committee for the past several weeks. He read until his eyes ached, the tea and toast cooling untouched beside him, reading because he had to, reading because Steve always felt that someone had to pay attention to what the bullies were up to, reading until his eyelids fluttered and right there at the desk he fell—

 

—The goose down pillow was soft against his cheek. Steve blinked, brought up a hand to scrub at his face, and then stopped abruptly when he saw the freshly healing paper cuts on his fingertips. 

"JARVIS," he said, sitting up and staring at his fingers—the fingers that had been unblemished the night before, when he and Clint had worked their way through slice after slice of pie—"JARVIS, I need you to find Tony for me. Now."

Tony was in one of his workrooms, the music cranked up loud enough that it was something felt rather than heard, and Steve's skull reverberated to the sound of someone telling him to pour sugar on them. Steve gestured at JARVIS to turn the music down, and then waited patiently for Tony to work through all his objections to being disturbed when he was right in the middle of fixing a really tricky joint on the suit. 

"Luckily for you," Tony said, finally winding down, "it's the middle finger, so I can't flip you the bird right now, but give me a moment. What's up?"

Steve folded his arms over his chest, trying not to feel ridiculous and self-conscious about standing there in t-shirt and sweatpants and saying something like this. Still, it wasn't as if he had an alternative plan, so he took a breath and said, "There's something going on. Something that—when I fall asleep at night, I see Peggy. Like, really see Peggy—she's alive, and we're married and living in 1948 and it's not a dream."

Tony's expression changed to one of vague panic. "Uh, well, uh. Feelings aren't really my specialty; you could get a signed affidavit from Rhodey about that. Or just, you know, go talk to Pep instead, she knows some people who could, you know." He waggled his fingers. "Head doctor you."

Steve shook his head. "No, this isn't… you've read science fiction novels, right?"

Tony snorted. 

"So don't they have stuff about… I don't know, alternate timelines, crossing over from one universe to another?"

"Yeah," Tony said, gaze fixed warily on Steve as he walked over to the workbench and picked up one of the luridly green shakes that he was so fond of. "But the great thing about novels is that they're fictional. Stuff happens in there that doesn't obey the laws of physics. So if you're—"

"I woke up this morning," Steve said, holding out his hands, "and there were cuts on my fingers that weren't there when I went to sleep, but I did dream about getting them. There's something going on, Tony. These dreams don't feel like any dream I've ever had before."

Tony looked at him for a long moment, then reached out and snagged one of Steve's hands in his and peered closely at the cuts, his calluses catching against Steve's. He was silent for a while, then rolled his eyes, and Steve was never sure, afterwards, if what he had said had convinced Tony, or if Tony had just decided to humour him. "Fine," Tony said, "just call me Horatio."

Steve raised an eyebrow at him. 

"What?" Tony huffed. "More things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of, yadda yadda, why's everyone always so surprised that I've read stuff?"

They spent the rest of the day in the workroom. Steve bounced a tennis ball off the wall and caught it, over and over, while Tony asked him questions and poked at him with sticks and came up with a list of possible explanations and lines of inquiry. Steve didn't think the poking had any scientific purpose. "Obviously," Tony said, "we can't rule out the possibility that you're just, you know, nuts, but senility comes to us all, grandpa—"

"Thanks," Steve said drily. 

"—Or that it's all feelings or what have you. But let's face it, we could also be looking at clones, body snatchers, alternate universes, split timelines, temporal paradoxes…" 

"Or what if it's… me having to make up for something? Trying to stop something from happening? The other me, I don't know how deep he's into it," Steve said, "But his department's planning to take advantage of war refugees from Eastern Europe, force them into espionage even if… That's not what I fought for, Tony. What if I'm getting pulled over there because I'm supposed to set things right?"

"Huh," Tony said as he revolved in slow circles on a wheeled desk chair, twirling a pen around and around between his fingers. "That would be very pulp scifi novel but… hrm."

Round about nine a.m., Tony's terminology got technical enough that Steve had no chance at all of following what he was saying, which made Tony huff some more and then set up a video call with Jane Foster. 

"It's six in the morning," Jane said when she answered. She was rubbing sleep from her eyes, and her t-shirt bore a picture of Little Red Riding Hood holding a smoking shotgun, one foot planted on a furry mound of dead wolf. "This had better be good." Of course, as soon as Tony explained his theory to her, she perked right up, put on her glasses and peered at Steve like he was a particularly interesting lab specimen. "A Roman ring, on a localised subatomic level, it could cause a temporal cascade effect that—"

Steve tuned them right out once it seemed like he wasn't going to be called on to provide any further information and got up to a count of three hundred with the tennis ball before the workroom door opened and Bruce walked in. "Hey, guys," he said, sipping from a cup of what smelled like hot grass clippings; probably some of that herbal tea of his that he swore had excellent calming qualities. "What's up?"

"Not much," Tony said vaguely. He and Jane had apparently seized on a fruitful idea, and had been unnervingly quiet for the past twenty minutes. He'd filled up two whiteboards so far with an equation that seemed more Greek letters and arrows than actual math to Steve. "Just trying to see if Cap's swapped bodies with his own evil twin in his sleep."

Bruce looked over at Steve. 

Steve lifted his shoulders and tried his best not to look too sheepish. 

"Okay," Bruce said slowly, backing towards the door. "Well, I have to go… be… elsewhere now."

Lunch was ordered-in Italian food and soda, great mounds of pasta and greasy garlic bread eaten around the phone calls that Tony fielded from Colonel Rhodes and from Pepper. "No, no, I'm not trying to get out of the… my track record for attending board meetings is actually pretty… if you must know, I'm trying to fix Cap's brain." There was a brief pause. "Well, frankly, I think that's uncalled for."

Steve got JARVIS to download a couple of novels onto one of the StarkPads that lay around the room, and spent the rest of the day alternating between reading something called _The Antelope Wife_ and doing push-ups. 

"Show off," Tony said. A little after nine by Steve's watch, Tony dragged the cot he kept in here to the middle of the workroom, said, "Wait here," and Steve watched as he vanished into an attached storage room before reappearing wheeling some kind of machine on a cart. 

"That does _not_ look like a standard EEG machine. Where did you unearth that from?" Jane asked. She'd mainlined an impressive amount of coffee over the course of the day, enough that she'd had some sort of spat with her assistant about the coffee pot by mid-afternoon. Steve was surprised that her holographic image wasn't vibrating itself into static. 

"Well, uh, what the Pentagon doesn't know won't hurt it, right? Also a stricture which holds true for Fury, so, uh, if neither of you could talk about this in front of him, that'd be awesome."

"Tony—" Steve began. 

"Yeah, yeah," Tony said, snapping his fingers. "We'll take the riot act as read. Get over here, I have to get this thing set up."

Attaching the electrodes took a long time, between Jane and Tony squabbling over the best positioning and the fact that the saline solution used to stick them to Steve's scalp didn't work so well. Sitting there quietly while they talked over his head made Steve think of being back in that underground room in Brooklyn: the cool and gentle press of Dr Erskine's fingers, the unsettling feeling that came with giving up some control over himself, even if it was in the cause of doing the right thing. "This is going to tell you something useful, right?"

"It monitors your brain activity," Tony said. "Fluctuations in electricity flowing between the neurons. There are some pretty standard baselines for what the readings should look like when you're awake versus asleep, and by tomorrow morning we should have enough data to show us if you've got some disordered sleep patterns."

"It probably won't indicate if there's a sub-quantum black hole in there," Jane said in a helpful voice, "but while that's theoretically possible, statistically it's pretty unlikely."

"Oh," Steve said, before lying back gingerly, careful not to dislodge any of the painstakingly placed wires. "Well, that's comforting."

But as he lay there, trying not to fidget, it was comforting to know that he would have two people watching over him while he slept—that maybe soon he'd know one way or another just what was going on—and the blanket that Tony threw over him was warm and the—

 

—His first thought on waking was that he'd have to work out some way of telling Peggy what was going on. 

His second was that he'd better not make any sudden movements. 

Steve was still sitting at the desk where he'd fallen asleep the night before, yesterday's clothes clammy and uncomfortable on him, his neck stiff and sore. Peggy was sitting opposite him, wearing a tweed skirt and sensible shoes and holding her service revolver; the expression on her face was one he'd previously seen her wear when they were about to attack a HYDRA stronghold, as was the bright crimson slash of her lipstick. 

"I'm quite certain," she said, never taking her gaze from his face, "that you owe me some sort of explanation, because I'm just as certain that you're not my husband. I'm good at detecting untruths, and I'm an excellent shot. It's in your interest to be honest."

Steve swallowed heavily. "Peggy—"

"Mrs Rogers, for the moment," Peggy said. "And an explanation, if you don't mind."

Slowly, Steve sat back in his chair, careful to keep his hands visible, making sure not to break eye contact with her. He'd always known that Peggy was a formidable shot, had watched her stand calmly in the middle of a busy Brooklyn street and take aim at an assassin with no thought for her own safety, but he'd never had her fierce determination trained on him quite like this before. "I'm Steve Rogers."

"I believe I specified honesty," Peggy said, her voice limned with ice. "And you are _not_ my husband. You've been standoffish and strange. Steve laughs; you don't. You don't kiss me in the morning, you hesitate before touching me, like it's something you're not used to, and 'Gee, I'm tired, Peggy' is never an excuse I've heard you use at ten on a Sunday night." 

Steve felt himself flush, but Peggy continued, "I catch you staring at me like—like I'm someone you've only seen in photos. And Millie called me up this morning and asked if you were feeling quite well, because you hadn't so much as said hello to her yesterday and every time she walked past your office you were poring over files and taking notes on operations that were months old." At Steve's blank look, she clarified, "Millicent Townes. Your secretary. And of course, last night you came home and turned down dinner in favour of reading over old newspapers for no readily discernible reason, because Millie had no idea of there being anything so urgent going on which would require you to stay up past midnight. All of which—"

"Peggy."

"A HYDRA plant would make sense," Peggy said, and she was always so brave—her voice wavered only slightly. "Take someone of similar height and build, give him my husband's face, have him sleep beside me in our bed—"

"I'm Steve Rogers," Steve said, then clarified hurriedly when Peggy cocked the gun, "I'm _Captain_ Steve Rogers. From—well, to be honest, it's complicated and we're still trying to figure it out, but I don't think I'm your Steve either. I'm a… a different version of the same guy, I suppose."

Peggy slowly lowered the gun and stared at him. "Steve was promoted to Major in 1946. Are you trying to tell me—what, you've time-travelled here from the past?" Steve hadn't heard her sound that incredulous since the time Howard had told them of his virtuous youth as a Boy Scout.

"Sort of. But also… no?" Steve said, fighting the urge to rub at the back of his neck. "It's really complicated, but—" He had an idea. "I don't know when things started being different here. Did you guys find the Tesseract?"

"The Tesseract?" Peggy said. "Yes, of course, it was in the wreckage of the plane when we found you."

"Did I ever tell you what it showed me when Red Skull dropped it?" Even now, after all the times he'd described it for S.H.I.E.L.D. scientists and for Tony and Bruce, it was hard to put the right words to what Steve had seen—the bright flare of lights that came from half a galaxy away, the shocking wash of heat and the disorienting sensation that what he was looking at was at once a few feet across and a billion miles wide. 

"Other worlds, Howard thought," Peggy said slowly. "Other times." 

"The scientists I'm working with," Steve said, "they think maybe this is a case of parallel universes. I'm still Steve. I'm the guy who…" He closed his eyes, trying to think of some of the moments he'd had with her that no one else would know—the best proof that he had. "When we saw one another again in Italy, I was drawing a sketch of a monkey on a high wire, because that was me, in front of hundreds of guys who were risking their lives for their country, every day, and I'd never felt like such an idiot. Then a couple of months later, Howard explained what fondue is, and I'm pretty sure that was worse. Back during basic training, when I got that ride back to camp with you after the thing with the flag, we didn't really talk but you hummed Glenn Miller under your breath and I thought you were the prettiest girl I'd ever seen, and I didn't realise it until I got back but I'm pretty sure I loved you from the moment you risked everything so I could get to Bucky because how could I not want to be the kind of guy that a dame like you would put your faith in."

That might have been the longest sentence Steve had ever spoken, and maybe it was the most important. He took a moment to breathe in, shakily, and then Peggy said, "Huh."

Slowly, Steve opened his eyes to see that Peggy had put the gun to one side and was looking at him with an expression that was no less questioning or curious for all that the worst of the anger had gone out of it.

Steve felt suddenly, terrifically shy, like he was five foot nothing and Bucky's sidekick all over again, and looked down at his hands—at the wedding band which still gleamed golden on his finger. "So, uh. This me made it to the Stork Club after all, huh?"

"Yes," Peggy said, "Two left feet still, though." Judging by the awkward quality of her smile, she felt about as uneasy with this whole mess as he did. It made sense, of course. Steve still loved her with a force that left him breathless, but as far as his mind was concerned, it had been a year since he'd hit the ice, twelve months where he'd found himself mourning Peggy twice over and struggling to stop the world from ending. For this Peggy, they'd never been apart, only grown closer together, earning all the things that Steve had always been told he should want: promotion and recognition, a nice house that was about as far from a Brooklyn tenement as you could imagine, a happy marriage and a brand new car in the driveway. Now her Steve was gone, and in his place was a sort-of stranger wearing an apologetic smile, with no answers to offer.

"Well," Peggy said briskly, "we'll need to push on if we're to get to the bottom of this any time soon." She stood and smoothed out the lines of her skirt, patted her hair back. "If we leave as soon as you've washed up, we should make it to Howard's before noon."

"Howard," Steve said, because how could he have forgotten Howard? If there was anyone who could help them figure out what was going on from this end, it was Howard Stark. 

"Yes," Peggy said, "either you're being pushed from your side or pulled from ours, and he's the one person I know with the best chance of figuring it out. Well," she went on, cocking her head to one side, "at least he'll do it without first locking you up as a threat to national security."

The drive into the city from the suburbs was quiet, except for Peggy's occasional muttered commentary about other drivers and their dreadful tendency to obey the speed limit—apparently three years of peace hadn't been long enough to alter her driving style. Steve was fascinated by the city outside the car windows, as the suburbs gave way to office buildings which gave way in turn to the tall, elegant apartment blocks of Park Avenue. Men hurried to appointments in overcoats and proper hats; women walked along with an upright, restrained carriage that their granddaughters would abandon. This wasn't the New York City he'd been getting to know in the twenty-first century, but it wasn't quite the city he remembered leaving behind when he'd shipped out, either. 

Howard's apartment was a showpiece, full of furniture and ornaments so obviously antique that Steve felt nervous and clumsy just looking at them: one point, apparently, on which the two sets of memories jumbled up in his brain agreed. He was pretty sure that the painting hanging in the entrance hall was a Rose Period Picasso, and Steve stood and stared at it until Peggy cleared her throat in a pointed manner. Howard welcomed them in and offered them cocktails, even though it still wasn't quite noon, but settled for mixing himself a stiff drink for himself once they explained why they were there, knocking it back in one long swallow. 

"Look," Howard said, "not that I don't think you believe what you're telling me, but that doesn't mean it's true. There are lots of other possible explanations for what you've been experiencing. I don't want to be an ass here, but it's not like we know what the long-term side effects of the serum might be—it could make you more prone to hallucinations, cause personality changes..."

Howard didn't have to outright name Johann Schmidt; they were all thinking about him. Steve was thinking too about Bruce, and how far the pursuit of the serum had pushed so many people, the consequences it had had. His hands clenched, unbidden. "There's more," Steve said. "Where I'm from—it's not a directly parallel universe. I'm… in my timeline, I didn't make it out of that crash in '44, and I didn't get found right away. The serum kept me alive, frozen, for a long time, and when I woke up… well, when I go to sleep here, I wake up back in 2013."

There was a long pause. "I beg your pardon?" Peggy said eventually.

"I'm going to need another drink," said Howard. 

"The people I've been working with," Steve said carefully, because it was one thing to say that his consciousness was somehow shuttling back and forth between 1948 and 2013 for no apparent reason, and another to tell Howard that he'd been spending time fighting aliens in the company of his as-yet-unborn son, "they've had some ideas about what's going on." He concentrated on remembering as much as he could of Jane and Tony's conversation, not sure if he was getting all the vocabulary right or remembering all the nuances, but it must have been enough. Howard's jaw slowly dropped.

"Screw the drink," he said. "Just give me the bottle."

Howard was most intrigued by the fact that injuries seemed to carry over between one body and the other. "I've got no idea what would cause that—but I'm an engineer, not a theoretical physicist. My work's hands on, not abstract. Which makes me think…" He cocked his head to one side, stood up and walked over to a nearby desk. He rummaged in it for a moment, then produced a Swiss Army knife which he used to slice a thin line across Steve's palm. 

"What the hell?" Steve said, watching the blood well up rich and oxygen-dark. Howard hadn't seemed _that_ drunk. 

"Well, that'll be definite empirical proof for the people on your side," Howard said. He sounded so triumphant that Steve felt bad about having to explain the EEG machine to him, and how they'd soon have empirical proof regardless that didn't rely on Steve bleeding all over an antique rug. 

"Good God, Howard," Peggy said, digging a handkerchief out of her pocket and using it to bind up Steve's hand, fingers careful on the sore skin. "If this is your approach to experimentation, no wonder those flying cars of yours keep ending up at the bottom of the Hudson."

"Hey!" Howard said, looking outraged. "Those were just minor incidents that—hey, wait, Rogers, does everyone have a flying car in 2013? Or has everyone moved on to jetpacks by now?"

"Uh," Steve said, but his hesitation in responding was a little less down to the fact that it was awkward to explain to Howard that Stark Industries had never quite got the hang of flying cars, and more down to the fact that he felt suddenly, shockingly sleepy. "I don't… I…" He was swaying on his feet, stumbling, feeling drunk in a way he hadn't since before the serum. 

"Steve!" Peggy cried, sounding terrified. He blinked at her as she guided him to the nearest sofa and he sat down hard on it. There was probably something he should be saying, but words had never seemed a more difficult thing to use; his tongue felt thick and unresponsive in his mouth. Steve blinked at her face which came close even though her voice sounded increasingly far away and he yawned and—

 

—Tony's face was about three inches from his, and he was furiously shaking Steve by the shoulders. Steve sat up so fast that their foreheads almost cracked together. "What the—what happened?" he said, feeling disoriented, still half-asleep. 

"This is really important," Tony said, voice low and urgent. "Are you feeling the urge to vomit pea soup right now?"

Steve stared at him. 

"Sorry, sorry," Tony said, flapping a hand at him, "pop culture reference, my bad. It's just that either you're possessed or—JARVIS, replay footage from camera 1, starting at 3:37a.m."

"Yes, sir," JARVIS said, and one of the holographic interfaces flickered into life just in front of them, showing Steve asleep and Tony alternating between doodling on a StarkPad and watching him. It was pretty embarrassing: watching his own face slack and loose in sleep, the way his hair fell across his forehead and the way he burrowed into the pillow every so often, as if trying to get more comfortable. 

"And here we go," Tony murmured as the time stamp in the bottom right-hand corner of the screen changed to say 0338. Steve watched as, on the outstretched hand of his onscreen self, a thin red line appeared as if drawn by an invisible pen. Steve looked down at his hand, where the cut Howard had made still stood out against his skin. 

"So, you know, that looks pretty conclusive that something's going on," Tony said as the screen flickered out of existence. He was doing a good impression of nonchalant, but the pitch of his voice gave him away. "I mean, between that and the fact that within a minute of you falling asleep, all your higher brain function vanished, but you, you know, kept on inhaling, exhaling, all that good stuff. And then just before I woke you up, boom, the EEG records it all coming back, like someone flipped a switch. Which makes me think that either you're a medical marvel—well, medical marvellouser, because not even a straight guy could deny the power of your abdominals, let's face it—or your brain really is going temporal walkabout while you're asleep."

That conjured up a pretty strange mental image, and Steve was still trying to shake it when Tony tossed him a first aid kit and told him to clean himself up before breakfast. 

Steve squinted at the clock on the wall. "It's still only four in the morning, Tony."

"Uh huh," Tony said, poking on something on his StarkPad, "yes, well, start early, get a clear run at the day, that's what I always say."

Steve dabbed some antibacterial cream on his hand and stuck a large band-aid on it. "Don't you always say that the only good thing about seven in the morning is the fact that if a party's lasted that long it's—"

Tony flapped a hand at him. "Bygones, old habits, my New Year's resolution—"

"It's _November_ —"

"Plus, the sooner we get the others working on this, the better."

Steve squinted at him. "You want to wake up the others to have breakfast at four in the morning to talk about this?"

"Not want to," Tony said, with a certain manic cheerfulness. "Already have. C'mon, better get going if you don't want Bruce to call dibs on all the granola before you get there."

None of the others looked happy about being summoned to the breakfast table before dawn. Natasha peeled an apple in one long strip using one of her throwing knives, staring at Tony the whole time before biting into it with a decisive crunch that made Steve wince. Bruce looked like he was about to keel over into his bowl of granola; Pepper and Clint were passing the coffee pot back and forth like it was a shared lifeline. 

"So," Tony said, "you're probably wondering why I gathered you all here today." His caffeinated energy wilted a little in the face of the others' glares and Pepper's eye-roll. "Right, well, okay, long story short, Cap's been experiencing what you might call… slippages in reality over the past couple of days. When he's awake, he's here, when he's asleep, he's in an alternate version of 1948 where he's married to my dead Aunt Peggy, and any physical damage experienced in one reality seems to carry over to the other. Pass the yoghurt?"

"What," Clint said flatly, "the fuck."

"Well, I just thought I'd throw this one open to the floor," Tony said, dumping several spoonfuls of sugar into his coffee, "since this is rapidly getting beyond even mine and Jane's expertise and you know, you watch knife wounds appear suddenly on someone's skin when they're asleep with no apparent cause, you get a little concerned."

"Oh my god," Pepper said, startling in her seat, her eyes growing wide. " _Knife_ wounds? Steve, are you okay?"

"I'm fine," Steve said, feeling oddly embarrassed, holding up his injured hand and waggling his fingers at the others. "Just a scratch, really."

Natasha looked at it steadily, then at Steve's face, before turning her gaze to Tony. "You haven't considered the obvious?"

Tony raised his eyebrows and made a little gesture with his spoon that clearly meant _carry on_. 

"Magic," Natasha said, shrugging.

"Loki's locked up back on Asgard," Steve said. 

"Bag of cats," Bruce said slowly. "But it's not like he's the only being out there who can use stuff like that—that doesn't work on the rules that make sense to us."

"I could hit Steve over the head to see if that works," Natasha offered, tucking one red curl behind her ear. "Cognitive readjustment."

Clint winced. "Please, no. I've still got a dent in my skull from the last time you did something like that."

"It worked, didn't it?" Natasha said, smirking. 

Pepper wrinkled her nose. "Trying to concuss someone probably isn't a very efficient problem-solving method." 

"I don't know," Tony said, reaching across the table to snag the French press for a refill. "It's worked for me a time or… twelve."

"Uh huh," Pepper said, the slyly amused expression on her face belying the severity of her tone, "but that is because you're a pretty ridiculous person whereas Steve is quite sensible."

"That is a calumny," Tony said, stealing some of the apple peel from Natasha's plate, "a gross mischaracterisation, because I am in fact a _very_ ridiculous person and Steve is unbelievably sensible. Probably started a pension when he was five."

"Put in two bits a week regular," Steve said solemnly, and was gratified by the way Clint snickered and Bruce huffed into his cup of tea. 

In the end, they decided that the best course of action was for Steve to go back to sleep, see if there was anything going on in 1948 that smacked of magic. Tony didn't looked thrilled at the fact that Steve had sought advice from his father, but agreed that it was probably the most sensible thing that Peggy could have come up with. "That was Aunt Peggy for you," Tony said fondly as Steve lay down on one of the big, soft sofas in the living room. "Always a sensible, terrifying nightmare in tweed."

Steve wasn't even going to touch that. 

Pepper tossed a Sharpie over to Tony, who uncapped it as Steve plumped up the pillow and then settled back against it, willing himself to give in to the creeping exhaustion that lurked at the edges of his vision. He'd had to learn how to snatch quick naps in foxholes and halfway up trees, after all; he'd just have to think of this as a much more comfortable spot to get some sleep in the middle of a fight. "Remember," Tony was saying, "anything at all that might be attr—"

 

—"But mythological figures, of all things?" Peggy was saying. Steve blinked awake to see her holding his arm, staring down at the back of his hand with a furrowed brow. "'Watch out for Loki'?"

"Yeah," Howard said, "although to be honest, I'm a little more focused on the 'P.S. Hi Dad' part of the message."

Steve groaned and sat up. Trust Tony to want to complicate an already fraught situation even further. He rubbed at his head, which ached in a way he hadn't felt since he and Bucky had been fifteen and got canned on a bottle of gin. 

"Does that honestly seem the most important part of the message to you?" Peggy was saying. 

"Well, you can't say it doesn't stand out," Howard said, prodding at Steve's arm. "That's a pretty unambiguous statement and unless you and Steve are a whole lot more Greenwich Village than I ever thought, it's not addressed to _you_."

"Can we talk about the P.S. later?" Steve said. 

"Since I presume that it is indeed the less important part of the message," Peggy said waspishly, "go right ahead."

"Okay," Steve said, figuring that bluntness was the better part of valour in this case, "it turns out that aliens are real. Some visit Earth in the twenty-first century, but there have been some here long before that—really powerful beings, so powerful that some people back in the day thought that they were gods."

" _Aliens_?" Howard said, a look on his face like all his Christmases had come at once.

"And you're saying that Loki and Freya and Odin were… are…" It was rare that Peggy looked flustered, but Steve couldn't blame her—it had been a lot for him to swallow, too. 

"Yeah," he said. "And Loki's dangerous and angry and he wants power. We don't have any proof that he's involved, but it fits his style and his methods. He attacked Earth last year—last year my time—and destroyed most of downtown Manhattan trying to get the Tesseract."

"Another bully," Peggy murmured. 

Steve nodded. "We stopped him, but he's pretty powerful and his people don't always play by rules that make sense to us. If he got free, or if they decided to release him, well… he likes to play with people."

Howard scratched at an eyebrow. "Not that I remember much history from my school days, but he was a trickster god, wasn't he? So that would make sense if there's any truth to—excuse me a moment," he said, when the shrill sound of a ringing phone filtered through from the next room. 

He stood and went out and left Peggy and Steve sitting on the sofa. Steve realised that Peggy hadn't let go of his arm since he'd woken up, her fingertips soft points of warmth against his skin. He cleared his throat, feeling awkward and uncertain. "Thank you," he said. 

"For what?" Peggy said, shifting so that her fingers were curled loosely around his wrist. 

"For believing me. For trying to help me, even if I'm not really… well, you know."

Peggy frowned a little, and even though she was looking down at their hands, Steve could tell that she was seeing something else entirely. "Do you remember back in basic training, when Colonel Phillips threw that dummy grenade at your group and you ran forward and covered it?"

"Yeah," Steve said, a little confused. It had been a split second decision, that was all, running and bracing himself and hoping that it would work. That it would be quick. Doc Erskine had tutted over him later, casting his eyes up to heaven and looking as if he was nursing a secret smile. 

"That's the man I married. That's you, regardless, and I couldn't just—"

"I'm sorry," Howard said, coming back into the room and making Steve jump a little. For just a moment, Steve had forgotten all about him. It was clear Peggy had, too, because her jaw tightened and she looked away, silent. "That was one of my labs. There's something they want me to go in and check on, can't wait. What say you two come with me? We can keep brainstorming on the way, try to work out who we can consult on this. I know some guys at the AEC who might have some ideas. Shouldn't take that long."

They headed over there in one of Howard's car, a low-slung red beauty that purred across the Queensboro Bridge while Steve tried to get comfortable even though his knees were up around his ears. In the front seat, Peggy and Howard were trading names back and forth—people who were reliable, people who definitely shouldn't find out about what was going on, who might be the best person in the army brass to contact if things continued to escalate. Steve's head felt weirdly hollow, what he could only imagine was the side effect of having a body—bodies—that had been getting lots of sleep over the past few days but a mind that hadn't. He was rested and exhausted all at once, and it was disorienting enough that it seemed to be playing tricks on his vision. A great crack, golden and glowing, seemed to split the afternoon sky over the river for a moment before Steve blinked and it was gone. 

The drive took them about an hour, way past Brooklyn, to a part of central Long Island that Steve didn't know so well. The Stark AeroIndustries buildings were set back a little from the street, surrounded by high chain-link fences and what seemed like an acre of asphalt which was covered with row upon row of well-tended employee cars. As orderly as it was outside, inside was all restrained confusion. They were met at the door by a man in a lab coat who introduced himself in a strong Jersey accent and distracted manner as, "Shel Cohen, pleased to meet you," before he hustled Howard off down a long corridor without so much as a backward glance. 

Peggy looked at Steve before shrugging, as if to say _well, I'm not waiting here, are you?_ and setting off after them. Steve sighed and followed her, telling himself that well, no one had outright said they had to stay at the door—knowing that he would have followed her regardless. The room that they ended up in was a high, echoing space, all red brick and metal girders and blocky machinery, and in the middle of it was something that Steve recognised right away. 

"What the hell is the Tesseract doing here?" he demanded. He could feel his pulse starting to pick up, thrumming double time, because there were kids playing jump rope on the street outside and forget what he'd told Fury about leaving the damn thing at the bottom of the ocean: Thor's father should have dropped it down the nearest black hole. 

"Well," Howard said. He'd put on a pair of odd-looking goggles and was way too close to the damn thing for comfort, peering at it. It looked as if electricity was crackling around the Tesseract, but Steve was pretty sure that whatever it was, it wasn't anything as innocuous as electricity. The closer they got to it, the colder the air around them became. "Apparently, it's been sending out random energy spikes after four years of inert nothingness."

"That doesn't sound good," Peggy said. 

"No," Howard said vaguely. "Not…" He snapped his fingers. "Who's got the latest readings?"

One of the scientists—a tall, blond man with an equine face—hurried forward and handed a clipboard over to Howard. "It's really picked up in the last ten minutes or so, sir. We're starting to see coupled oscillations, harmonics across a range that… you should just look at the readouts. We've never seen anything like this before. It's defying every prediction."

Howard snatched the clipboard from the man, pushing the goggles back from his face while he leafed through the pages. "I don't… it's…" His fingers drummed out a pattern against the back of the clipboard, a repetitive syncopated rhythm. "This pattern it's broadcasting, it's not in response to external stimuli that we can pick up on, it's not any radiation signature I'm familiar with…"

Peggy cocked her head to one side, hummed the pattern under her breath. "You know, it almost… I mean, it's obviously not the same thing, but it reminds me a little of Morse code—all those short, sharp bursts."

Steve and Howard looked at her, then at one another. "Could it be sending a message to someone?" Steve asked.

Howard shrugged, gave a little half laugh. "Frankly, your guess is as good as mine, Cap. This is way beyond anything I could figure out on my own. Give me a couple of months uninterrupted work and some tools that could actually touch the damn thing and maybe I could tell you something, but right now…"

"So Steve shall just have to bring the data with him to 2013 and have them analyse it there," Peggy said, folding her arms. "It's too much of a coincidence for this to start happening now and not be related to Steve in some way, and I do not like the thought of that thing summoning _anything_."

"Can you do it?" Howard asked Steve. "Memorise it?"

"I can give it my best shot," Steve said. His cognitive function had increased a lot with the serum—he'd never be a genius, like the Starks or like Bruce, but his spatial and pattern recognition were pretty good. If he could recall the map of HYDRA's bases after a brief glimpse, he could do something like this. 

Howard went a little easy on him, broke the more complicated math down into a pattern that Steve could convey easily, scribbled some of the rest of it on the back of Steve's hand. "If the people you're working with are any good, they should be able to decipher it without any problems."

"Your son," Steve said, because if Howard was willing to help him out with all of this, no questions asked, Steve could give him this, too. "One of the scientists who's helping me—he's your son."

Howard stared at him for a long moment, eyes suspiciously bright. "My son?" he said, before he cleared his throat and said, so nonchalant that it was almost convincing, "Yeah, well, chip off the old block. Anyway, let's get you a pillow and a quiet corner, huh?"

Steve went and sat down in a far corner of the lab, repeating the pattern over and over to himself while he willed sleep to come, but it was difficult—he was too keyed up, too anxious, with the rhythm bouncing around inside his skull and adrenaline making his nerves spark so much that it felt a little like he was standing back in Manhattan's canyons again, looking up at the churning sky. "I can't sleep," he admitted to Peggy, "I feel like I should be getting up and hitting something, not lying down and nodding off."

Peggy squatted down in front of him and looked at him very seriously. "I know you don't remember our wedding vows, but they were quite standard."

In this position, her face was so close to his, and Steve couldn't help himself—it felt as if the words had been just waiting for him to say them for years, and maybe it was now or never. "I love you," he blurted out, before feeling his stomach lurch and saying, "I mean, that's the… it's what people say in the vows. The bits that are standard."

Peggy's eyebrows quirked, and for a moment Steve half thought she was going to laugh, but instead the line of her mouth shifted and she settled for saying, softly, "Yes, we did say that part." There was a pause that was a little too long for comfort before she seemed to shake herself and went on more briskly, "Though I was thinking of the C of E's slightly more contractual elements."

Steve frowned at her until he worked out what she meant. "You mean the 'for better, for worse' part?"

"Quite," Peggy said. "Though I'm thinking mostly about the latter clause at the moment. Sorry about this, darling, but it is in a good cause."

And then she pulled back her fist and swung, hard enough that—

 

—the room was full of a low hum of conversation, threaded through with the intermittent beeping of machines. Steve groaned softly and pulled himself up off Tony's sofa. He needed to take a leak really badly, and geez, apparently Peggy packed a punch that could reverberate across the decades. His jaw ached. 

"Oh, hey, Sleeping Beauty's awake," Tony said around what looked like a mouthful of pizza. He had one of his terrible-smelling shakes in one hand and a printout from one of the machines in another.

Steve grunted at him and headed for the small restroom that was just off the living room. When he was washing his hands, careful to avoid dislodging any of the equations scrawled across his skin, he peered at himself in the mirror. He looked pale and shaken, and a bruise was already starting to bloom on his jaw. "That's my Peggy," he told himself wryly, and splashed some cold water on his face. 

When he went back into the living room, he saw that Tony and Bruce had been joined by half a dozen people wearing white lab coats and S.H.I.E.L.D. ID badges. Steve didn't know if he'd ever get used to the sensation of being in a room full of very smart people, most of whom were looking at him like they'd give their eye teeth to be able to dissect him. "Are all these people really necessary?"

"Fury found out," Bruce said. He looked a little on edge; Steve supposed he probably thought much the same about the S.H.I.E.L.D. scientists. "Thought we could use the extra help with our diagnostics."

Steve lifted an eyebrow. 

"Don't worry," Tony said. He sounded manic enough that Steve would bet he hadn't slept in quite some time. "Natasha's been sharpening her knives in a really significant way; they're not going to step out of line." The gaggle of scientists looked unnerved; Bruce just rolled his eyes. "Oh come on, why are you guys looking at me like that, it's not like _anyone's_ being subtle here. Anyway, I take it from the squiggles on the back of your hand that you come with tidings, Old Man van Winkle."

Steve told Tony about the patterns that the Tesseract was emitting, scribbling them down on a piece of paper. "We know the Asgardians used to own it, but we have no idea where it originally came from, right?" Steve said. "So maybe this is Loki, or maybe something else is going on. Peggy thought that maybe it was broadcasting a message to someone."

"Smart Aunt Peggy," Tony said, looking over what Steve had written before handing it off to Bruce. "We hooked you up to some of these while you were asleep," he said, gesturing at the machines. "Trying to get all the measurements we could, and you're starting to emit trace levels of gamma radiation."

Steve couldn't help his gaze flickering over to Bruce. 

"Yeah," Bruce said drily, pushing his glasses back up his nose. "That kind. Not enough to hurt anyone, though."

Tony picked up another slice of pizza from the box that sat on the coffee table. "Want some? No, fine, your loss. Anyway, the radiation indicates that you're starting to become a temporal anomaly. The more you go back and forth from one time and space to another, the worse it gets. Pretty soon you'll start causing an irreversible tear in the fabric of the other universe."

Steve frowned. "Why the other one? Why not this one too?"

"Well, you'll cause one here too, eventually," Tony said shrugging. "But this is where you're starting out from. Here, you're still like a… temporal itch. In the other one, well…" He mimed aiming and firing a gun with the index finger of his free hand. "Think of it like this. You fire a .45 at someone, the bullet punches a round little hole on the way in, but it leaves a hell of a lot of damage on the way out."

Steve blanched. He thought suddenly of the crack he'd seen in the sky over the Hudson—what if that hadn't been just the flickering of an exhausted brain? "So you're saying if we can't stop this, I'll end up destroying an entire universe?"

Tony and Bruce looked at one another. There was a long pause. "On the bright side," Tony said, "Bruce and Jane and I are very excited to co-author a paper about your brain? But, uh, yeah. The other universe won't be able to stand up to the temporal stresses. Also… probably your brain, will, uh. Well, I hesitate to use the word _explode_ —"

"What Tony is saying in a not very eloquent manner," Bruce said, polishing his glasses on the hem of his shirt, "is that we still have no idea why the anomaly's centred on you, but our best guess is that the Tesseract's key to it—maybe because of your previous exposure to some of its radiation back in the Forties. It's the only thing we know of that's got the power to do something this big over this sustained a period of time. So if we can shut it down, we stop the mechanism that's pulling your consciousness back and forth between worlds."

Steve folded his arms. "And how do we do that?"

"That's… sort of still a work in progress," Tony said, scratching at the stubble on his jawline. "It's not exactly something that's easy to do from this end, and trying to do it with late Forties tech, even if your on-site engineer is Dad, well…"

"Well?" Steve prompted, arching an eyebrow. 

"He'll either figure it out," Tony said, "or he'll blow some stuff up."

"Stuff?"

"Uh. The Northern hemisphere?"

Steve ate while Tony and Bruce tried to compress their advice and equations down into something that could be equal parts memorised and scrawled on the still-bare parts of Steve's arms, and then utilised by the technology of seventy years ago. Natasha had brought him out a plate of turkey sandwiches and a glass of milk, and then perched on the back of the sofa and watched him eat. A couple of months ago it would have made him nervous, but Steve had long since worked out that this kind of silent, hawk-like observation was one of the ways in which Natasha showed affection. 

The final lines of math and boiled-down jargon that Bruce wrote on Steve's arm in precise handwriting meant nothing to Steve, but Tony assured him that it was the best way they could think of to shut off the Tesseract. "I mean it might, you know, cause a brownout in the Tri-State area, but it's better than the alternative. Just tell… tell Howard that he's going to want to step up to at least 480V, and it has to be direct current, okay? AC would be bad."

"Understatement," Bruce said dryly as he replaced the cap on the Sharpie. 

"Sure," Steve said, because it wasn't as if he had a counterargument to offer here. "What happens then?"

"Well, best case scenario, the link's broken and you either wake up in your proper body," Tony said, "or you're, uh, trapped there forever. But, you know, no universe-ending catastrophe, yay?"

"Yay," Steve said flatly. He looked around him, at the way his team was all sticking close, even if there was nothing most of them could do to help. If this was the last time he'd fall asleep here, he realised, he'd miss them all fiercely. After the ice, he'd known that he could never find a group that could take the Commandos' place, and he'd been right—but he'd forgotten the possibility that a new group could mean just as much.

Steve didn't know how to say goodbye, or even if he should. Past grief didn't necessarily make you any better at knowing the right words to talk about the possibility of loss. He brought the glass and plate back into the kitchen and stood at the sink there, drinking a tall glass of water while looking out at the city. The skyline bristled with cranes, New York doggedly remaking itself once more, and Steve scrubbed at his eyes before he padded back to the small restroom. There he brushed his teeth and swiped under his arms and at the nape of his neck with a damp facecloth, getting rid of the worst of the gritty feeling. It was sort of futile, given that he then walked back into the living room and laid down on the sofa to sleep again but it made him feel better—a little more at home in his own skin. 

Still, it was difficult to sleep—even though he felt wrung out, even with Natasha still keeping watch from her perch on the back of the sofa, even with Clint pacing up and down outside on the balcony with his bow in one hand and a full quiver of arrows on his back. Steve could feel the others watching him, the scientists with their clipboards just waiting for him to fall asleep, and the more he tried to relax, the tenser he grew. He tried lying on his back, he tried curling up on his side, he even tried counting sheep, but nothing helped.

"JARVIS," Tony said softly, "bring the windows to 80% opacity, bring room temperature up to 72." The room was soon dimmer, warmer, and the throw that someone—Bruce, Steve thought—draped over him helped, but what felt like an interminable age later, Steve was still painfully conscious of the inside of his eyelids. 

Eventually, Tony said, "I have something that might help. It's, uh, slightly medicinal, though and we might have to amp it up a little for you, given the serum, but—"

Steve sighed and sat up. "Just go get it," he said. It wasn't what he'd prefer, but time was passing in the other world just the same as it was here, and Steve hadn't been blind during the war—he'd seen the way the RAF had doled out little pills to its pilots, stimulants before missions and sedatives afterwards. The things had worked—in the short term, at least. 

Tony came back with a box from which he produced a couple of small vials and a syringe that he filled with a practiced ease. "If you could just, uh, not tell Pepper about me still having this," he said while Bruce tapped at the crook of Steve's elbow, bringing up the vein, "that would be fantastic."

Steve and Bruce snorted in unison, because there was no way anyone would willingly insert themselves between Pepper and Tony on a topic like this.

"Perfectly safe, though. It should you several hours there, give or take some super-soldierness," Tony continued. He administered the injection with a surprising gentleness, massaging the skin around it afterwards with his fingertips. "Honestly, this just gives me flashbacks to my MIT days… but if you could also please not tell Rhodey I said that, because he—"

 

—the concrete floor was cool beneath Steve's cheek, and the air was full of a roaring, crackling noise, like a fire that had grown huge but still hungered for more fuel. He raised his head, blinking, feeling groggy, and then started to his feet as soon as he saw what was going on: a full-blown standoff between Loki and Peggy. Steve supposed that no matter how the guy had shown up, there was no way Peggy could have mistaken someone who stood over six feet tall and was wearing a horned battle helmet for anyone other than Loki. Peggy had her revolver aimed unerringly at him; Howard lay unconscious at Loki's feet.

"Steve," Peggy said evenly, her gaze flickering over to him.

"Ah," Loki said without looking away from Peggy. "The man out of time. How nice of you to rejoin us."

"I thought Odin had you locked up on Asgard," Steve said. He walked forward, braced for a fight. Loki might not have shared his brother's penchant for brawling, but that didn't mean that Steve could underestimate him, either; Loki wasn't above letting things get physical, or fighting dirty. Yet as he did he saw there was something odd about Loki. When Loki turned his head, when the fingers of his left hand curled ever so slightly, it was as if he blurred somehow. The ground beneath his feet was as cracked as a pond during the spring thaw. "Or maybe he finally threw you out—heavy landing?" Steve asked, nodding his head at the spider web of cracks that was slowly radiating out from around Loki. 

"An unfortunate side effect of travel between our reality and one like this," Loki said. "As a wedge, Captain, you are efficient but lacking in all finesse—all this artificial back-and-forth, pulling me over here ahead of schedule. But I suppose, why _should_ you break the habits of a lifetime?"

"Blaming me for not doing your dirty work well enough?" Steve said, while he looked around the room in search of something that might help him. The only weapon, as far as he could tell, was in Peggy's hand. The Tesseract sat on its platform in the middle of the room, crackling now with barely contained energy. The temperature in the room had dropped perceptibly, and the handful of scientists who remained sat terrified and shivering in the far corner. Maybe Steve could make it over to the nearest worktable and use that as a crude weapon, but he'd seen enough of Loki's abilities to know that even he probably wouldn't be fast enough. 

"Shall I just shoot him and have done with it, darling?" Peggy said. 

"Um," Steve said. 

Before he could add anything, Peggy pulled the trigger once, twice, and the bullets hit Loki right in his centre of mass—and passed right through, like a hand passed through candle smoke, and buried themselves in the brick wall behind him. 

"Ah, yes," Loki said, looking down at his chest and smoothing out the fabric there before raising his head and smiling. There was no warmth in his expression. "About that. I'm afraid I'm not quite corporeal yet. No matter what you try to do to me, you can't hurt me. I'm still only a shadow in this world. For now."

Steve inched a little closer to Peggy. "All this work to get a Tesseract, and you still can't lay a hand on it? Doesn't seem like very effective planning."

"Patience, Captain," Loki said, spreading his hands out. "I know that you humans are short-lived mortals, but I think even you should be capable of waiting until the next time you close your eyes. Quite frankly, this has taken no time at all, in comparison to how long it would have taken to ferret its counterpart out from wherever Frigga has concealed it."

"All this was easier than just looking for the damn thing?" Steve said. 

"My lady mother is quite a resourceful woman," Loki said, strolling over towards the platform where the Tesseract sat. The cube's light seemed to spark along his helmet's horns; the cement flooring crunched beneath his feet as he walked. "And now all I have to do is wait for you to fall asleep one last time. You can't stay awake forever, and all I need is one last push to make it through fully. Once I'm fully manifested, it doesn't matter where you move the Tesseract on this world. I'll be able to take it."

Peggy lashed out with one foot and caught Howard none too gently in the side. "Wake up," she hissed.

Howard twitched, moaned, then slowly cracked open one eye. "Ugh. Shouldn't have had that last gin and… oh. Shit."

"Look," Steve said, keeping one wary eye on Loki while he rolled up his shirtsleeve and then holding out his bared arm to Howard. "What can you make of this? The others said that if you had this, and if I told you that you needed at least 480V of direct current, you'd be able to figure out a solution."

"Tick tock," Loki called. He was standing with his hands clasped behind the back, watching the Tesseract hiss and shake, like a man standing in front of a Monet watercolour at a museum: all polite, calm interest in another's masterwork. 

Howard read and re-read the lines on Steve's arm, shaking his head the whole time. "I have no idea what to do with this. Give me a couple of weeks, sure, a month maybe, and I might come up with something. I get the general direction they want me to go in, but I have no idea what interface they want me to use with this and the device."

"But they said—"

"Yeah," Howard said, dropping Steve's arm and taking a step back. "I'm sure what they said made sense to _them_ , but they've got the benefit of time and experience and group work, not to mention technology that's a hell of a lot more advanced than anything I've got access to."

"A setback?" Loki said. The blurring around his outline was getting worse—it was like trying to watch a TV programme during a bad thunderstorm, the set battling to compensate. "Dear me, how upsetting."

"You know," Peggy said, "don't think that Steve's the only one you have to look out for here—he mightn't be able to stay awake forever, but the rest of us will take you on. I've fought worse than you before."

Loki bared his teeth at her. "Oh, but you won't. Captain Rogers here, well, it's best to think of him not as a wedge to an _also-is_ , but to a _might-have-been_."

Howard frowned. "What?"

"I'm sure your little helpers have theorised at you already," Loki told Steve. "The green one and the drunk. Parallel universes, that sort of thing. Only this is nothing of the sort—it's a pocket universe, a parasite, a little bubble that's been propped up around you thanks to my powers and the Tesseract's possibilities. You're a weak spot in time, Captain, ripe for the exploiting, but even my powers aren't omnipotent." He stamped his foot, and even though the sole of his boot didn't quite seem to make contact with the floor, more cracks spread out from around him. The floor was unsteady beneath Steve's feet now, and the walls were also starting to crack—he had no idea how the building was still upright. "Once I've got the Tesseract and have returned triumphant to Asgard, there'll be no need for me to prop it up anymore. Struggle all you like, but you won't be able to push back against something as inevitable as that."

"Wait, what?" Steve said, because if what Loki was implying was true… 

Loki spread his hands, a gesture that on anyone else might have been one of supplication, of bargaining. "Don't you see, Captain? You offered me a means to do this, with all your maudlin little dreams about what you never got to have—quite the beacon to someone looking for tools to use. All I had to do was hitch a ride on your shadow, nudge your dreams in this direction and that, hold out a vision of your precious Peggy, and every time you fell asleep wanting, back you came here and so did I."

Steve shook his head, because it had all come out of the blue—hadn't it? But then he thought of himself a few nights ago, sitting there in his quiet bedroom with a tin of shoe polish at his elbow, worrying at old memories, the way a tongue would at a loosening tooth. It hurt worse than a punch in the gut—the knowledge that he'd been manipulated and used in such a way, without his knowledge, without his ability to do anything to push back against it; the knowledge that Loki had taken the one little selfish daydream he'd still allowed himself and twisted it. Out of the corner of his eye, Steve saw Peggy's jaw clench. 

"If he does turn corporeal," she said, "I bag first chance at punching him in the face."

Steve had rarely wanted to kiss Peggy so much, but settled instead for taking her free hand in his own and squeezing it.

"Temper!" Loki said, eyes widening, sounding scandalised. He turned to Steve and grinned. "I can see why you'd dream of her, though—all that energy, all that _spirit_. Must make bedtime a positive delight."

Peggy might want to punch him first, but Steve was going to be a close second. He pushed down the anger, which wasn't going to get him anywhere right now, and said, "Any ideas you've got, Howard, now's the time to mention them." The drugs Tony had injected into his other self would keep him here for another several hours at least, but it wouldn't be forever—not to mention that Loki was capricious and a liar and might turn on them at any time. 

Ashen-faced, Howard was scribbling something on a pad of paper while listening to some brave, white-coated employee who'd come scurrying in to the room and was whispering in his ear. Howard cursed under his breath, crossed something out, tried again, and then tossed the pad of paper onto the nearest table. "It's no good," he said. "There are reports coming in from all over the world of tremors where there shouldn't be any seismic fault lines, and they're getting worse. If Loki's telling the truth, then there's nothing I could do even if I did figure out a way to shut off the Tesseract."

"Why would I dissemble?" Loki called out. "All I have to do is ask you to face the facts. There's no indignity in surrender." He had to raise his voice to be heard over the noise of the Tesseract. The light coming from the cube washed him out, turned him into a black-and-white illustration from a book of children's fairy tales. 

"There's always something," Peggy snapped. "There's always an option."

"Most of the time, yeah," Howard said, "but this is… this universe is like a soap bubble, okay? It can hold up against more than you'd think, a whole atmosphere's worth of pressure, but there's all this temporal weight pressing in on it, and eventually the tensile strength's just going to fail. It'll collapse like it never was—because it won't have been. This world's always been here, but it's also only existed for as long as Steve's dreamed about it."

Steve's shirt was sticking to his back, damp with sweat, and he closed his eyes for a moment, steadied his breathing. There was too much to think about here, too much on the line, and he had to work on ignoring as much of it as he could: on focusing just on the things he could actually do. Time for the sacrifice play. "So if we have to go out, we go out stopping him, right? If we can't turn the goddamned thing off, and there's no way to stop what's happening, we make sure he can't get the cube."

"If we can't…" Howard broke off suddenly, and there was a look in his eye—a manic, determined look that Steve had come to see regularly in Tony's over the past several months. "Well, maybe we just go the opposite, put a little pep in this. You gotta go out, go out big."

Steve folded his arms. "Explain."

"You've set a baseline, all those times you came through and went back," Howard said, "set up oscillations that we can keep track of. It's a lot easier for me to give the Tesseract a push, get it to do what it's been doing on an exponential level, than to make it stop. It'll push everything that's not from this dimension right back through to the other side; the concussive blowback should seal the tear right back up. You'll all be gone, and there'll be no way back—no other chance at this reality's Tesseract."

"You think that has a chance of working?" Peggy asked. 

Howard shrugged. "Sure. Or it could blow up the Northern Hemisphere, but frankly at this point, that's more a question of when and not if."

"Can you—there has to be some way of you making it out too, right? If you rig it properly, maybe you could—" Steve stumbled to a halt, words and imagination failing him in equal measure as he tried to work out something, anything, that could be done.

Howard shook his head. "No, Steve, look." 

Steve followed the direction of Howard's pointing finger and looked up to see that there was a crack overhead. Steve's eyes wanted to insist that it was in the ceiling, but somehow he knew that it wasn't: that the crack ran through something far more profound than brick and mortar, that he was looking at something that human eyes couldn't quite process, try as they might to force it into only three dimensions. It was like being back on that plane, watching the Tesseract bloom into life for the first time, and the room was so cold now that the tips of Steve's fingers were starting to grow numb. 

"The tear's not that big, and besides, someone has to be here to make sure that this will work," Howard said. He looked over at the group of scientists still huddled in the far corner, and Steve knew there was another reason he wasn't saying: Howard wasn't going to leave his people any more than Steve would leave his. "No getting out of this for me." For a moment, he seemed to shake, but then he squared his shoulders, said, "Right," and walked over to Peggy and laid one on her.

Steve was not at all surprised at how hard Peggy could slap someone. 

Howard just beamed at her. "Yeah, that's pretty much what I always thought it would be like. You hold on tight to him, okay?" he called over his shoulders as he ran up the steps to the Tesseract's platform. 

"Acts of desperation won't get you anywhere," Loki said, but the tight look around his eyes gave Steve some hope.

"What?" Peggy said. "But I can't—"

"Sure you can," Howard said. "Tear's not that big, but it's not that small, and if I can direct the energy just right, I can push you through, make it permanent. It'll seal off the tear, make it sure that your universe isn't affected by any blowback. You don't have her in your reality any more, right?" he asked Steve. 

For a moment, Steve swallowed hard, then shook his head. 

"Are you honestly suggesting that I leave everything behind for another universe?" Peggy asked, voice tight and choked; she sounded _furious_ , though Steve couldn't tell if she was angry with him, or Howard, or the whole situation. "Just… just abandon everything and…"

"Never known Margaret Carter to back down from a challenge," Howard said. 

Steve could have asked her to choose, pleaded with her to choose _him_ , but he knew that wouldn't be fair. Whatever vows she'd made, he didn't think they could possibly encompass something like this: the choice to step into an unknown future just because the thought of losing her again sickened him. 

Peggy hesitated for a moment before nodding decisively. "All right, then," she said, and some great, idiotic, inappropriate part of Steve felt like whooping with joy.

"Great," Howard said, strapping back on his goggles, "so you two crazy kids go get your happy ending."

"You're simply delaying the inevitable!" Loki shouted at them. 

"Oh, put a sock in it, Goat Boy," Howard snapped.

Loki tried to get close enough to knock Howard off the platform, but the closer he got to the Tesseract, the less corporeal he seemed to become. He was growing bleached out, faded, like a photo left in a window for too many years. For a moment, it seemed as if his fingertips grazed against the cube's edge but then, mouth open on a silent howl, he vanished. 

Steve reached out blindly for Peggy, wrapped an arm around her waist while they watched Howard connect some wires to the Tesseract, the cube already shaking and hissing like a pressure cooker on the verge of exploding. Peggy held on tightly in return, her fingers digging painfully into the skin over Steve's hip. It was almost too bright to look at, but Steve felt that he had to—had to bear witness to it, just like he had to find the right words to say goodbye to Howard, who had been his friend in an odd way.

"You should know," Steve called out over the building noise, "your son learned how to be a good man from you—the kind of guy who puts his life on the line for other people." Maybe that wasn't entirely true, maybe Tony's education had come a little late, but it was the kind of thing that _could_ have been true, if things had been different, and this was the one last gift that Steve could give. 

Howard paused, one last switch ready to be thrown, and looked over at them. Steve couldn't read his expression behind the goggles, but the line of his mouth quivered once, briefly. "'PS, hi dad'?"

"His name's Tony," Steve said, and then there was nothing but light, growing brighter and brighter, blue and golden and white as stars and—

 

—Tony's face was once more much too close. "I hope you're going to replace that couch. Pep had it custom made. Hey, Aunt Peggy."

Steve groaned and lifted his head. He was in Tony's living room, and while he was lying on his back just like he had been before falling asleep, the sofa was now splintered beneath him, as if the Hulk had decided to smash. Steve felt bruised all over, like he'd been dropped from a great height, and he was freezing, and the after-effects of the drugs made him feel sick to his stomach, but he was alive, and Peggy was right there beside him, her arm still wrapped tightly around his waist. She was trembling hard, as if she too felt chilled to her bones, but smiling at him: that great, bright smile that he'd fallen in love with a couple of years ago, a lifetime ago. 

Intellectually, Steve knew that he was lying on a ruined sofa in the middle of Tony's home, being stared at by a gaggle of scientists, but he couldn't help himself: relief rushed hot through his blood and all he could do was stare back at her and grin helplessly. 

"Well, on the plus side," Bruce was saying, brandishing a tablet computer in one hand, "it doesn't look like his brain's home to any more temporal anomalies, and all the damage's been reversed, like it never happened in the first place."

Tony snapped his fingers. "Let me see, let me s— Oh well that's just… frustratingly against all the laws of physics."

From where he was lying, Steve couldn't see her, but he very audibly heard Natasha spit, " _Magic_."

Peggy nodded in Tony's direction. "Howard's son?"

Steve laughed softly and nodded. "Yeah, that's him."

"Figures," Peggy said. She sat up gingerly, coughing a little, looking around herself with what Steve thought was pretty restrained curiosity for a woman who'd woken up that morning sixty-five years earlier in another universe; who'd just found out that her very existence was due to a quirk of magic. 

"So, uh," Steve said. "I know that I'm not your Steve… well, I mean, I sort of am, I think, based on what Howard said. But I mean, I don't know if we're really actually married, or if you still want to, you know. Not that I ever want to presume, because—"

Peggy arched an eyebrow. "You still don't have any idea how to talk to a woman, do you?"

"Not, uh, not so much," Steve said, but his words died with a soft click in the back of his throat when Peggy leaned in and kissed him. It was soft, and sweet, and slow, and full of so much promise—full of so much hope that they would have a future together that Steve felt his hands shake with it. "Okay," he said. And—

 

—the next morning, when Steve opened his eyes, she was still right there beside him. Under the thin blankets, their bare legs were tangled together and Steve watched Peggy's sleeping face for a long while, feeling astounded and grateful and so, so happy. Outside the bedroom window, he could see Manhattan rebuilding itself and the bright sky, clear and blue, and Steve smiled and closed his eyes again.


End file.
